


im trans.

by danielnotfound



Category: transgender - Fandom
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:35:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27425809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/danielnotfound/pseuds/danielnotfound
Summary: kind of an explanation of how i dealt with growing up with being trans? idk man
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	im trans.

Hi! I’m Dan and this is my story of being transgender and learning to accept and love yourself for who you are. This story (if I can even call it that) is like a documentation(?) of my personal experience of being trans and how much of a toll it has on your life. Because people always assume wrongly that its all sunshine and rainbows and one day you wake up and you’re like ‘oh I’m a boy now’ and its as easy as that, well to put it simply, its not. It’s a whole ass journey of self-reflection and acceptance, so here goes nothing I guess :).

So I guess I’d always known I was different from a young age. I wasn’t the most popular kid, but I was well-known? If you get what I mean. From when I was about 5 years old until I was 12 id only ever had one solid friend because I found it hard to trust people in a way? When I was about 10 was when puberty started to kick in, so that’s when all these thoughts stemmed from and what’s lead me to be the guy I am today. But before we get into that mess I wanna talk about gender expectations. From a young age I was brought up with the fact that girls enjoy doing makeup and making themselves look nice for boys, and boys would always be outside playing sports and not really caring about their appearance. Luckily this was only my grandparents and auntie who believed this and not my actual parents but that didn’t stop them from forcing gender norms onto me. Every annual Christmas party I would be made to wear a dress and have my hair looking pretty in these tight ringlets. I never really liked how I looked but I was only seven years old and I was always taught to that ‘adults know what’s best’ so I just went along with it. every year on Christmas I would walk downstairs and see that all of my presents were wrapped in pretty pink wrapping paper and lots of sparkles and fairies, whereas my brothers would have greens and blues and reds. Id always told my family that my favourite colour was blue, but I guess I just figured that I wasn’t allowed to like it because that’s ‘a boys colour’. I remember opening princess dolls and hairbands and accessories to make myself look ‘prettier’ and ‘more girly’, where y brothers would be opening doctor who figures and lego. I never really liked the princess things, but I didn’t want to seem unappreciative and rude, so I said my thankyous and went to play with all of my new toys in my room. But this in a way lead my family to believe that I wanted more of these things so I would be constantly bought the new princess dolls and eventually makeup and things of that sort. 

When I was ten however, I started to be much more independent. I realised how much I hated the way I looked, and I realised I wanted a change, and so I cut my hair. No one knew because I knew I would get shouted at for it. so I got some kitchen scissors and got to work, I was only ten okay leave me alone I didn’t know what I was doing. Before I did this my hair was probably down to about three or four inches past my shoulders? I think, well anyway I cut it to be about two inches above my shoulders. I honestly have no idea how I thought that no one would notice. But I did it anyway! And it went surprisingly well ill be honest. But then I made my first big mistake, I didn’t know where to put the hair that id cut off so I simply shoved it down the side of my bed because out of sight out of mind right? Well for the first few weeks miraculously no one noticed anything different so I thought id gotten away with it, but of course I didn’t, that would be way too easy! I remember I went away on one of those Christian camps for a week -I know right, lets send our trans-questioning kid on a trip that teaches you how being anything other than straight and cis is a sin- but anyway, my mum thought it would be a nice idea to clean my room for me which is really sweet of her! So I arrived home and I was shocked that my old bunkbed (where id stuffed the hair down the side of) had been moved to a different position so my initial thought was *uh oh I’m in danger*, but again nothing had been mentioned so I figured it was going to be okay? Well oh how wrong I was. My mum had found the hair and instantly knew what had happened, so she challenged me on it. it turned out that she actually liked my hair shorter! She just didn’t like me lying to her which I understood, however not everyone reacted this way to the news. I remember my nan being so disappointed in me and it broke me. She just looked so sad and I knew it was my fault and I hated it so, so much because I didn’t mean to make anyone sad! I just wanted to like who I looked at in the mirror every morning. 

Skip forward a few years to when I’m in year 7 and I’ve just turned 13 years old. At this point in their life most people born female have gone through puberty and started to act more grown up and independent. All of the other girls my age were getting up early so that they could sort their hair out and they would all be wearing skirts to school, but then there was me with my trousers and scraped back pony tail so that I could look as masculine as possible, yeah I was basically asking to be called names at that point in my life I’ll be honest, but I was young and innocent and I didn’t know that expressing myself was necessarily wrong. That was until I was getting changed for PE once. I would get changed in the shower block with my best friend because I never liked my body and I didn’t want anyone to make fun of me for it, and I of course trusted my bet friend because we’d known each other literally since preschool, well its funny how a nearly 10 year long friendship can end in the matter of a few days. I was getting changed and my friend, let’s call him James (he’s also trans but ill explain all of that later), well he saw that I was wearing boxer shorts because I found them comfier and he saw that I was wearing trousers and I guess the thing that made him speak up was the fact that he noticed that I was wearing two sports bras (one on backwards and one on forwards). So he respectfully asked me why I wore them like that, and I explained to him that it was because it made my chest much flatter and that made me feel happier and comfier in my body. I guess he didn’t understand this, so he asked me to elaborate. I explained to him that he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone but I felt much comfier in boys clothes and I would always refer to myself with male pronouns and the name ‘dan’ instead of my birth name, and that I’d read about a thing called transgender and that’s what I thought I was. He was the first person I ever came out to so it was my first real experience of seeing how someone would react, and to my surprise he acted well! Or so I thought. So I went home that day and I researched transgender and watched a few videos and that was when I knew completely that that was what I was. I remember waking up the next day and leaving the house early so that I could talk to James a little about what id discovered and I was really excited! I could finally talk to someone about everything! That was until I saw him. He’d got his hair cut into a much more masculine style and I sort of didn’t recognise him at first as he was wearing trousers. Now James never wore trousers, so this was the main this that confused me the most. James told me that he had gone home, and researched transgender and he realised that that was what he was, at first, I was so happy for him because he’d finally found himself! But then I got a bit jealous(?) you could say. Because id been begging my parents to let me get a haircut for months and months, but I was never allowed but James could just go home and ask, and he was allowed? He’d also changed his name at school to James so that was basically him transitioned as much as he could at such a young age. Everyone at school accepted him so this lead me to believe that I would also be accepted so I was excited!! I however wasn’t yet out to my parents so I couldn’t change my name at school yet or get my hair cut shorter, but I still felt like a boy, so I decided to act upon it. I’d made a small group of friends who were all a part of the LGBTQ+ community that I came out to first and they all accepted me straight away and helped me buy more masculine clothes and style my hair to look more masculine. They all accepted me with no hesitation, and I remember it made me so warm at the heart because I knew that they actually cared about me. I then came out to James, assuming that he would accept me because he understands what I was going through and he knows exactly how I was feeling, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He accused me of ‘copying him’ and he told me that id ‘always been copying everything he ever did’ and I was like a shadow and there was no wonder I didn’t have many friends, and that I would be nowhere without his help. This made me finally stand up for myself and realise that I didn’t really need him as a friend as he was a negative impact. Id always pushed aside his little comments about me but thinking about them now, they weren’t that small? He said some mean stuff and ill be honest I don’t know how I managed to stand through it for so many years. 

Well I managed to move on from James and I was now a lot closer to the other group of friends I’d made. They truly made me happy and made me feel comfortable with myself because no matter what, they always called me Dan and referred to me with he/him pronouns. They would let me talk about my problems and I would let them talk about theirs, but I’ll explain that more later. Whilst all of this was happening in my life I’d never stopped begging my mum to let me get a haircut and it got to the point where I would try to cut my own hair which my mum found out about and so took away all scissors I had in my room. After about 4 months I couldn’t stand it anymore and whilst my mum was at work, I cut my hair. Like really short, in a way that she had to take me to the hairdressers to sort it out or I would get told off at my school. My mum was n o t pleased when she came home and discovered what id done but either way, she took me to the hairdressers to sort it out. When we got to the hairdressers my mum explained the situation to the hairdresser and showed her a picture of what I looked like with my long hair. Soon I had around 5 women crowding me asking why I would want to get rid of such ‘beautiful girly hair’, well you’ve hit the nail on the head there Janet, its girly. Anyway! Fast-forward a weekend and I was back at school on the Monday morning. Me and my brand new short hair!! I hadn’t told anyone that id gotten it cut because I guess I wanted to see their raw reactions in person. I arrived at school and all of my friends loved it! they kept complimenting me and I was so happy because I was in my element and I finally looked more like what society saw to be a boy. 

Fast forward to my 15th birthday. My friends had all put money together to buy me a binder! Like an actual GC2B one and I cried. They handed it to me, and I remember genuinely crying with happiness at how much I loved them all. But I guess that’s when the earth decided that little old dan was too happy and too content with life, something had to happen and it sure did. Over the Halloween half term break I got closer to a girl who was one of my friends old friends, lets call her Charlotte. Me and Charlotte got really close really fast and after about only 3 or 4 weeks of talking to each other, we became boyfriend and girlfriend. Now surely, you’re thinking ‘come on Dan, that’s so good! What’s so bad about that?’, well let me give you a bit of an explanation. Now whilst Charlotte and I were getting closer, Charlotte was also getting closer with her old friend who was also my friend which was totally fine, and I was okay with that! But there was one thing that Charlotte would do that set my dysphoria off on a frenzy, and to be honest I don’t think she even knew she was doing it. She would always innocently call herself a lesbian and refer to me as her girlfriend. It was an innocent joke, but it really got to me because it lead me to believe that she only ever liked me because I was trans and she didn’t actually see me as a boy, but as a girl. So this was obviously having a negative impact on my mental health, so I decided to confront her about it. I explained to her that it set off my dysphoria when she referred to herself as a lesbian as a joke and when she called me her girlfriend. I realised at that point that id made a big mistake and I should have just kept it to myself because from that point onwards things only got worse. Charlotte assumed that I was taking a dig at her and I was blaming all of my dysphoria on her and she wouldn’t let me explain myself. She blocked me on everything and broke up with me. 

And after this to top it all off, remember when I mentioned that as Charlotte and I got closer, her and her old best friend were also getting closer? Which automatically meant that she was getting closer to my friends and of course they all loved her and accepted her into their friendship group faster than you could say Louis Tomlinson’s name. So she obviously told everyone that I ‘blamed me being transgender on her’, and obviously when you put it like that it makes me seem like some massive self-absorbed literal penis. Anyway this made all of my best friends hate me too, which is already bad but just you wait it gets even better! I was sent screenshots of a conversation that one of my closest friends in the friendship group had with my literal best friend who I told everything to. In these screenshots one of them stated that they’d actually hated me for months but had just pretended to like me :) id honestly love to be kidding :). Also, my best friend basically said loads of shit about how I was apparently using her and her friends as emotional support because I would always ask them for advice when I needed help. But I was always lead to believe that friends were there so you could talk to them about your problems and they would do their best to help you but apparently not. So I was basically left with literally no one, making my dysphoria go crazy because people had started to say that I was faking being trans because I’d been asking everyone to call me Dan for 2 years but I still hadn’t officially changed my name at school because my mum wouldn’t let me. So everything was going wrong in my life and I felt like a whole ass mess. Then queen franchesca swooped in and made everything so much better. She took my side on the whole Charlotte thing because she let me explain myself and she realised that the whole situation was majorly gaslighted and I didn’t actually do that much wrong. I don’t even know if frankie’s reading this right now, but can I just say- everyone needs a frankie in their life, like she’s made me so much happier and saved me so many times and she doesn’t even realise. Right anyway ill stop being a simp now and carry on talking about being trans because I’m going off topic. 

Okay so in about December of 2019 when things had finally gone back to a sense of normal because id fit myself into a new group of friends and I was slowly starting to trust them with things. But everything wasn’t good, and honestly, I don’t think it ever has been since everything happened that November. But one night I slept at my nans. Now my nan’s a strong believer in the fact that men have roles in society and women have roles in society. She isn’t the biggest fan of gay people and she certainly is n o t a fan of transgender people. Now at this point my family had found out that all of my friends and some other people at school called me dan, but they didn’t want to call me dan, but they were 100 percent okay with using it against me! They would go to my nan and tell her that I’m a boy and they’re not exactly wrong but I’m not ready for my nan to know because I know that she won’t like it one bit. She never took it to heart though, so I assumed she’d just let it pass. I was right for a period of time until it obviously all caught up with her. she came into my room at her house and started shouting at me. It was the usual y’know ‘you don’t want to disappoint the family like that’, and how ‘no-matter what I do to change myself, I’ll always be her granddaughter’ but there was one thing that really got to me. She said, ‘your grandad would hate who you’ve become’. I was always really close with my grandad, I looked up to him and he was my hero and my nan knew that It broke me when he died. But for her to say it sort of made something click in my brain. For about a week I refused to believe that I was trans because I didn’t want to disappoint my hero, but I soon realised that surely, he would be happier if I was happy and not if I was pretending to be someone I’m not. 

After that it started to get a little better. In March we started quarantining meaning that I was stuck in a house with my parents and I couldn’t leave. Luckily though for those months leading to September me being trans was never really mentioned because I didn’t want to start an argument with them when I had no way of getting out of the house if I needed to for any reason. But when I got back to school in September the teachers were all calling me Dan, which I was confused about because they have to call you by the name that is on the register and I wasn’t aware that my name had been changed. So I got home, and it turned out that my mum had called in and asked them to change my name to Dan on the register! Now I know it seems like a small thing to you but for me I see it as a big step. She still calls me my birthname at home, but I like to think that her letting me be known as Dan at school is a step in the right direction. And that’s it for now! I like to think that my dysphoria is slowly getting less constant, I know it’ll always be there until I’m on T and I’ve had surgery but until then I think I’m finally happy! Lastly, I just want to say that I honestly wouldn’t be here right now without frankie, liv, monica, harriet, georgie and of course the kings sherlock and john and queen roxy, so thankyou. I love each and every single person whose taken time out of their day to listen to my story. So goodbye for now! Make sure you’re all hydrated and have eaten something sustainable. I love you all <3.


End file.
